Gong Xi Fa Cai

As I’ve mentioned before, I spent much of my early childhood living in various areas in Southeast Asia—Singapore, Indonesia, and so on.  All these areas celebrate Chinese New Year.  I celebrated Chinese New Year long before I ever celebrated the Fourth of July.  I can still remember how to say it, too—Kung Hee Fat Choy! I remember being about five or six, and we had a banner hanging in the living room of our apartment, gold ribbons with red letters, with these words written on it.

Of course, this is a mispronunciation of the actual proper Chinese, probably made easier for foreigners to say in the days before Pinyin was developed.  (As another example, consider the old spelling of Mao Tse-Tung, when the current accurate spelling is Mao Zedong.) When I just Googled the phrase kung hee fat choy almost all the pages returned were from Hawaii, so it appears that this is either a Cantonese variant on the original, or some kind of bastardization on the part of Christian missionaries centuries ago.

At any rate, here’s how you correctly say “Happy New Year” in Chinese:  gōng xǐ fā cái.  Phonetically this is pronounced “gong shee fah tsai.” Here are the characters.

Literally translated this means “congratulations receive wealth.” Idiomatically translated, it means “Have a happy and prosperous New Year.”

That’s one thing about the Chinese that I find so fascinating.  This is a communist country, where countless people were executed as “class enemies” during the Mao era for simply owning property or being a landlord.  (As one Chinese put it to me one day, “Mao made us all the same,” in the sense of the abolition of classes and the empowerment of the proletariat.) But everything, and I mean everything in Chinese culture has to do with one of three things—luck, fortune, and wealth.  And the three are all tied to the same general concept, that you will be lucky and receive good fortune in the form of wealth. 

So you can see why, as the Party wisely decided to abandon the economic idiocy of Marxism and collectivism, the ideas of business and profit and enterprise have taken off at such an astonishing pace.  Wealth and fortune and luck are in the Chinese DNA, and they’re the building blocks of capitalism.

God I love learning about this country. 

Hey Lee, have you bought enough “red packets” to give to your employees for New Year?

I remember my first Chinese New Years in Singapore, early 80’s, we went to visit my step moms family out near the old Changi Prison and everyone was giving me “red packets” full of money.

I was astonished, they lived in a “kampong”, basically a home with 4 walls and a tin roof, dirt poor and they were giving me money!! Amazing, the Chinese culture is always full of surprises.

Believe it or not, in about 5 minutes we have a meeting to discuss the “hong bao” the company is giving out (i.e. 2007 bonuses).  Since my employees aren’t really “my employees” (they’re coworkers, they just work under me) the company will be giving out the hong bao.

I did, however, give ¥400 to my ayi, who was honored beyond belief, since this is about half a month’s salary for her.  She left me a gushing note of thanks, wishing me luck and fortune and prosperity in the Year of the Rat.